The sequel to RED isn’t due until August 2nd, but the trailer for RED 2 is here, and it starts at Costco (with Polident in the cart!) and kicks into high gear in short order with bullets and careening cars and explosions and stuff. This time around, Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker et al. are hot on the trail of a missing nuke, and while Morgan Freeman’s not back (for an obvious, if you saw the first one, reason), Catherine Zeta-Jones, Anthony Hopkins, and Byung-hun Lee are along for the ride. You remember, of course, that RED is loosely based on the Warren Ellis graphic novel of the same name, although the movies take the concept far less seriously.

Anyway, between this, A Good Day to Die Hard, and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, we’re going to see a lot more Bruce Willis at the multiplex this year, which isn’t a bad thing after 2012, with Looper, Moonrise Kingdom, and The Expendables 2 on his resume. And even if you lament the lighter treatment of the source material, you can’t go wrong with that cast.

As a follow-up to the Nerdist podcast with Warren Ellis, here’s a very cool trailer posted by Mulholland Books today promoting “Gun Machine,” with Wil Wheaton reading from the book and Ben Templesmith drawing/animating. If you weren’t sold on the book before, and the podcast didn’t close the deal (although I imagine it probably did), this video is pretty persuasive.

And if you need more, here’s a synopsis:

After a shootout claims the life of his partner in a condemned tenement building on Pearl Street, Detective John Tallow unwittingly stumbles across an apartment stacked high with guns. When examined, each weapon leads to a different, previously unsolved murder. Someone has been killing people for twenty years or more and storing the weapons together for some inexplicable purpose.